Mark Weisbrot on Mexican election, James Zogby on Gaza crisis

This week on CounterSpin: The still-unresolved presidential election in Mexico is a lot of things to the U.S. press: a test of the appeal of trade deals like NAFTA, or a referendum on left-wing populism. It’s no surprise that the consensus media favorite among is conservative candidate Felipe Calderón. But what’s missing from the reporting? And when leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador calls for counting every vote, why do some in the press consider that a problem? We’ll ask Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Also on CounterSpin today, a major newspaper ran a recent column complaining that in Gaza, Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, and justifying it with the schoolyard line, “they started it”. If that sounds surprising, you should know that the paper was not a U.S. one, but an Israeli one. How does U.S. coverage of Gaza look in comparison? We’ll hear from James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.